space odyssey

Michael Benson works at the intersection of art and science. A writer, artist, and filmmaker, his new book, Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece examines the four year long production of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and was published on the 50th anniversary of that film’s release. During the last decade Benson has staged a series of increasingly large-scale shows of planetary landscape photography internationally. He takes raw data from planetary science archives and processes it, creating large-format landscapes. He edits, composites, mosaics, and then finally optimizes these images, producing seamless photographs of landscapes currently beyond direct human experience. His show Otherworlds: Visions of our Solar System, featuring an original new hour-long ambient composition by Brian Eno titled Deep Space, opened in the Jerwood Gallery of the Natural History Museum in London on January 22nd, 2016. It has since been exhibited at Vienna’s Natural History Museum, the Queensland Museum in Brisbane, Australia, and in Barcelona, Spain, at the CosmoCaixa museum. Otherworlds contains 77 large format digital C prints. Benson’s previous book, Cosmigraphics: Picturing Space Through Time, came out in October 2014 and was a finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Award.